Apr 15, 2015

A week ago, the Xubuntu team members were asked to vote if Xubuntu 15.10 should drop GIMP, Abiword and Gnumeric and include LibreOffice by default.

The vote expired yesterday and Simon Steinbeiß, the Xubuntu Project Lead, announced the vote results, which are as follows:

GIMP will be dropped;

Abiword will be dropped;

LibreOffice or parts of it will be installed by default.

This doesn't mean you can't use GIMP, Abiword or Gnumeric - they will continue to be available in the repositories so you can install them via Ubuntu Software Center.

Among the reasons of shipping Xubuntu 15.10 without GIMP is that the app takes a lot of space on the ISO and it has "a lot of features that the average user probably doesn't need", mentioned Simon Steinbeiß in a message on the Xubuntu Devel mailing list. He also pointed out that there's "no obvious or natural replacement for it", and as a result, Xubuntu 15.10 won't include any image editing software by default.

As for Abiword, according to Sean Davis, Xubuntu Technical Lead, the main reasons behind this decision are "Abiword's bugs and constant theming issues".

These changes will only affect Xubuntu 15.10 and the default applications list will likely be revisited for Xubuntu 16.04 LTS.